Twenty-five years after the start of a genocide that killed some 800,000 people, Rwanda is rebuilding with hope and shines with a new light, President Paul Kagame said at commemoration services Sunday.

Rwanda has expelled over 1,500 Burundians in recent days, government officials said Monday, amid worsening relations between the neighbors.

However, Seraphine Mukantabana, Minister of Disaster Management and Refugee Affairs, said the expulsions were part of a regular crackdowns on those living illegally in the country and were not targeting Burundians specifically.

Top level Rwandan genocide suspect Ladislas Ntaganzwa was flown from Kinshasa to Kigali on Sunday to face trial three months after his arrest in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The 53-year old former mayor is to be tried on nine counts of genocide, crimes against humanity and violating the Geneva Conventions during the 1994 genocide in which around 800,000 people were killed, mostly ethnic Tutsis.

A French general has testified for the first time in a probe into the role of French forces during the 1994 Rwandan genocide, sources close to the case said Sunday.

General Jean-Claude Lafourcade was questioned in particular over claims that France's U.N.-mandated Operation Turquoise, which he led, left ethnic Tutsis to be slaughtered by Hutu killers in the western Bisesero hills in June 1994, the sources said.

An imam accused of seeking to recruit young men to join the Islamic State group was shot dead in the Rwandan capital Saturday night while trying to escape from a police escort, police said in a statement Monday.

Muhammad Mugemangango, deputy imam of the Kimiromko mosque in the capital Kigali, was shot dead as he sought to escape police custody during an escorted visit to his home, they said.